Abstract
This Article analyzes Florida v. Jardines, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a canine sniff of a home from the front porch was a Fourth Amendment search. In reaching this ruling, the Court employed the property-rights definition of a search newly recovered the prior term in United States v. Jones instead of applying the reasonable expectation of privacy test created in Katz v. United States. This work examines the concerns created by Jardines’s ruling. This Article asserts that Jardines refused to resolve a potentially troubling incongruity between Kyllo v. United States, precedent that exalted the privacy of the home, and United States v. Place, a case that deemed a canine sniff to be a Fourth Amendment nonentity. Further, Jardines grafted onto its property-rights test an undefined and complicated implied license analysis. Finally, Jardines intensified the subjectivity of Jones’s property-rights rule by injecting a “purpose” inquiry into its new implied license analysis. The Court’s failure to consider the conflicts between Kyllo and Place, its creation of a new implied license rule, and its infusion of subjectivity into the Fourth Amendment could confuse the police and courts burdened with applying Jardines’s ruling.
Recommended Citation
George M. Dery III,
Failing To Keep "Easy Cases Easy": Florida V. Jardines Refuses to Reconcile Inconsistencies In Fourth Amendment Privacy Law By Instead Focusing On Physical Trespass,
47 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 451
(2014).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol47/iss2/4
